Multicast tree construction and flooding in wireless ad hoc networks

In an ad hoc network, each host assumes the role of a router and relays packets toward final destinations. This paper studies efficient routing mechanisms for multicast and broadcast in ad hoc wireless networks. Because a packet is broadcast to all neighboring nodes, the optimality criteria of wireless network routing is different from that of wired network routing. In this paper, we point out that the number of packet forwarding is the more important cost factor than the number of links in the ad hoc network. After we show constructing minimum cost multicast tree is hard, we propose two new flooding methods, self pruning and dominant pruning. Both methods utilize neighbor information to reduce redundant transmissions. Performance analysis shows that both methods perform significantly better than blind flooding. Especially, dominant pruning performs close to the practically achievable best performance limit.